Research line

Perception and Manipulation

The research of PERCEPTION AND MANIPULATION group focuses on enhancing the
perception, learning, and planning capabilities of robots to achieve higher
degrees of autonomy and user-friendliness during everyday manipulation tasks.
Some topics addressed are the geometric interpretation of perceptual
information, construction of 3D object models, action selection and planning,
reinforcement learning, and teaching by demonstration.

Research projects

Learning by demonstration

We devise methods to learn object-action relations to accomplish tasks at different levels of
abstraction, where object models are generated from visual and depth
information, and actions, involving manipulation skills, are learned from
demonstrations provided by a human using multimodal algorithms that combine
vision and haptics.

Planning for perception and manipulation

We are interested in view planning for object modeling, as well as
manipulation planning, with special interest in deformable objects. High-level
task formulations are integrated with low-level geometry-based methods and
simplified physical models, together with an on-line sensory-based treatment
of uncertainty, so as to come up with specific sequences of motion commands.

Perception of rigid and non-rigid objects

Our objective is to investigate computer vision algorithms for interpreting and understanding scenes from images, with applications in robotics and medical imaging. In particular, our activities are concentrated on retrieving rigid and non-rigid shape, motion and camera pose from single images and video sequences.

Perception and Manipulation Laboratory

The Perception and Manipulation Laboratory is equipped with 2 workcells: one
with 2 standard manipulators and an XY positioner, and the other with 2 WAM
arms in a reconfigurable arrangement. Additionally, researchers can find a 3
fingered hand, a Delta haptic interface, force sensors, several conventional
cameras, and high speed, high resolution, and 3D cameras. Laboratory service
offers quick experimental setup, several standardized software tools, and
expertise in robot control and perception algorithms. It also hosts the
Humanoid Lab initiative, with 15 small humanoid robots.